Platon's Sokrates was wrong: to someone who really knows how to read, a book is not at all like a painting, for while a painting looks alive but cannot answer you if you question it, your books can...
Wow this is great. Required reading of all students ... it's not a book, but like an appetizer they must eat before digging into the main course, the books themselves. Couldn't have been written better.
Leaving aside questions of quality, this strikes me as a compelling explanation for why simulations generated by LLMs are unlikely to ever replace books written by humans.
To lean on William James' apocryphal, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices," what is reading if not entertaining the ideas presented for a time, some to stay, some to adjust and some to reject.
Aristotle's "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" and Russell's (also likely apocryphal although I remember reading something along these lines) "reading a book in order to refute it is no way to understand it", come to mind as well.
Were Athene's eyes "bright" or were they "grey"? The answer is "both and neither", because glaukopis (γλαυκῶπις) may be translated different ways (my old Lattimore translation of Homer has got both "shining" and "grey" in the span of two verses!) The root of the trouble is that the ancient Greeks, while surely sharing our visual physiology, did not think about colour in the same way that we do, giving relatively more weight to albedo and less to hue, and so their language does not map exactly onto ours. But they wrote for themselves and not for us, so they took for granted a shared worldview and did not trouble to explain themselves explicitly. We may infer what they thought by how their writings refer to each other, but this corpus is limited and there is uncertainty. We may question this corpus as we see fit, but it will always say the same thing. So it is that some people today think that Athene's eyes were a slate blue-green but others think they could just as well have been cornflower blue. There is much about ancient Greek modes of thought that we paper over with retrojection.
The mental distance between me and Brad DeLong is much less than that between me and Platon; we share a language, a culture, and a worldview. Yet it is a difference of degree not of kind. When I read Slouching Towards Utopia and spin up my SubTuring instantiation of Brad DeLong, there really is something of Brad DeLong in it. Certainly I can distinguish it from my SubTuring instantiation of Robert Reich. But I think there is also a lot of me in it; my SubTuring instantiation of Brad DeLong can also be distinguished from someone else's. However much academics might like to talk of "interrogating a text", all such readings are ultimately self-interrogations.
Finally: in so far as Sokrates was wrong, he was doubly wrong, because one can interrogate a painting in exactly - and I do mean exactly - the same way that one can interrogate a text.
Wow this is great. Required reading of all students ... it's not a book, but like an appetizer they must eat before digging into the main course, the books themselves. Couldn't have been written better.
:-)
Leaving aside questions of quality, this strikes me as a compelling explanation for why simulations generated by LLMs are unlikely to ever replace books written by humans.
What a collection of the minds that brought us into the modern era of science, in one place.
Thanks for this.
To lean on William James' apocryphal, "A great many people think they are thinking when they are merely rearranging their prejudices," what is reading if not entertaining the ideas presented for a time, some to stay, some to adjust and some to reject.
Aristotle's "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it" and Russell's (also likely apocryphal although I remember reading something along these lines) "reading a book in order to refute it is no way to understand it", come to mind as well.
Were Athene's eyes "bright" or were they "grey"? The answer is "both and neither", because glaukopis (γλαυκῶπις) may be translated different ways (my old Lattimore translation of Homer has got both "shining" and "grey" in the span of two verses!) The root of the trouble is that the ancient Greeks, while surely sharing our visual physiology, did not think about colour in the same way that we do, giving relatively more weight to albedo and less to hue, and so their language does not map exactly onto ours. But they wrote for themselves and not for us, so they took for granted a shared worldview and did not trouble to explain themselves explicitly. We may infer what they thought by how their writings refer to each other, but this corpus is limited and there is uncertainty. We may question this corpus as we see fit, but it will always say the same thing. So it is that some people today think that Athene's eyes were a slate blue-green but others think they could just as well have been cornflower blue. There is much about ancient Greek modes of thought that we paper over with retrojection.
The mental distance between me and Brad DeLong is much less than that between me and Platon; we share a language, a culture, and a worldview. Yet it is a difference of degree not of kind. When I read Slouching Towards Utopia and spin up my SubTuring instantiation of Brad DeLong, there really is something of Brad DeLong in it. Certainly I can distinguish it from my SubTuring instantiation of Robert Reich. But I think there is also a lot of me in it; my SubTuring instantiation of Brad DeLong can also be distinguished from someone else's. However much academics might like to talk of "interrogating a text", all such readings are ultimately self-interrogations.
Finally: in so far as Sokrates was wrong, he was doubly wrong, because one can interrogate a painting in exactly - and I do mean exactly - the same way that one can interrogate a text.
Will Chat GPT become our Machiavelli's library? or Dante's Hell?
Ada Palmer also digs into this in Terra Ignota, but takes somewhat more space. Also, time.